102 THE MONKEYFOLK OF SOUTH AFRICA 



In your medical books you are told how humanfolk 

 mothers have nursed their infants just after a fit of great 

 anger, and how those little innocent infants died in con- 

 vulsions. They were poisoned by their mother's milk. 



I think I started oif by telling you about how long it 

 took a baboon boy and girl to grow up to be men and women, 

 but that idea about poisonous saliva came into my head 

 and I had to expel it first. 



Well, we baboonfolk live for nearly fifty years, if our 

 lives are not too hard. Sometimes food is so scarce and 

 the weather so cold that we die much sooner, but if life is 

 at all bearable, we live till we are about fifty, and even 

 longer. 



It is very seldom we live to be old in slavery. We are 

 captured and sent in great numbers to the countries of the 

 white people, away over the sea. They keep us in cages 

 and do their best to make us cosy and comfortable, but the 

 damp, cold climate soon begins to undermine our health, 

 and then a microbe you call a bacillus attacks us. He gets 

 into our lungs and starts to breed there. These microbes 

 breed in millions and trillions. They look like tiny bits of 

 stick. A bacillus microbe feeds on our lungs and grows 

 longer. Then he breaks off into many pieces, and behold ! 

 each piece is a fresh microbe, who at once begins eating and 

 growing and breaking himself to pieces, and thus giving 

 birth to more microbes until there are great colonies of 

 them. They at last eat up our lungs, and we die of what 

 you call consumption. 



You humanfolk often shoot or chloroform us when 

 you have kept us a few years in captivity, because you say 

 we get very bad-tempered. It's no wonder indeed that we 

 do. I wonder whether any of you humanfolk would be 

 sweet-tempered if you were chained up to a log or a pole 

 with a short chain, for long weary years, and fed upon any 

 sort of rough food at odd intervals, and teased and pelted 



